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Heather Poe, right, has always stayed out of the limelight, despite her relationship with Mary Cheney, the daughter of the former U.S. vice president. (CHARLIE NEIBERGALL / The Associated Press File Photo)

By Richard LeibyThe Washington Post

Tues., Dec. 3, 2013

WASHINGTON—For 21 years, Heather Poe has been partnered with Mary Cheney, daughter of Dick Cheney — and thus conjoined with one of the nation’s highest-profile political families. Yet Poe’s most publicly known trait is that she does not want to be publicly known.

“Incredibly private,” Mary Cheney has called the woman she married last year. The pair are raising two children in Great Falls, Va.

“Very unassuming,” says Stephanie Ciulla, a friend who plays ice hockey with Poe every week. “She’s about as average a person as you’d want to meet, and I don’t mean that in any negative way.”

Absolutely not interested in talking to the news media, Poe has always made clear.

But on Nov. 17, she let loose with a Facebook salvo shared ’round the world. Defending same-sex marriage, Poe fired back at Liz Cheney — Mary’s older sister, a Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Wyoming — after Liz reaffirmed on Fox News Sunday her opposition to gay marriage. In effect, Poe, who is typically sheltered in the wings, aimed a klieg light at herself.

“Liz has been a guest in our home, has spent time and shared holidays with our children, and when Mary and I got married in 2012 — she didn’t hesitate to tell us how happy she was for us,” Poe wrote. “To have her now say she doesn’t support our right to marry is offensive to say the least.”

Heather Roan Poe, 52, a low-key former UPS supervisor from Colorado, had always been the good, silent soldier — especially throughout the Bush-Cheney administration, as the Republican base consistently inveighed against same-sex marriage, and then-President George W. Bush backed a constitutional amendment to ban such unions.

For some Cheney family watchers, Poe’s comments were a shock: Why now, and why so publicly?

The same questions apply to Mary, 44, who forcefully endorsed Poe’s sentiments on Facebook. Mary declared Liz to be “on the wrong side of history.” Six weeks earlier, in a less-noticed Facebook post, Mary called her sister’s opposition to same-sex marriage “dead wrong.”

“This is the first public break,” says Kevin Kellems, who was White House communications director for the former U.S. vice president. “The Cheneys set the mark for discipline and unity. They were always one.”

As girls in 1978, Mary and Liz were deployed on their dad’s first congressional campaign. Mary served as an aide during both of her father’s vice presidential races. Liz served in his administration in a prominent State Department post. Dick Cheney is said to see a political heir in Liz — he has been boosting her for public office for years.

After the feud erupted, some in GOP circles wondered about Poe’s role: perhaps she pushed Mary from quietly opposing to openly challenging her sister? Knowing the key players, one Bush White House veteran speculated, “It’s less Mary than it is Heather.” Mary’s Facebook posts do not leap out as the work of someone being led; she is known to be quite strong-minded. There’s another less complicated conclusion: she and Poe simply took to the Internet to defend their marriage and reject the implication that their bond and their children — a son, 6, and a daughter, 4 — were somehow different, less valid.

“What prompted Heather to speak out is that she is a mother; it’s not about her anymore,” says Ciulla. “She is doing what any parent would do. It doesn’t matter who your partner is in life, it matters that you take care of your children. And they are thinking of them.”

Perhaps even more surprising than the public disagreement is that the sisters, three years apart in age and described as remarkably close, have become alienated.

“I don’t think Liz means to hurt her sister,” says Karen Spencer, who has known the sisters since they were young. In a comment on Mary’s Facebook page, Spencer pronounced herself “appalled” by Liz’s position.

“I haven’t talked to them in a long time, but I don’t understand why Liz is doing this; a lot of us don’t,” Spencer, a political consultant in California, said by phone. Hard-and-fast lines are drawn. The day her post went up, Mary Cheney told the New York Times that she would not be seeing her sister for Christmas. There is no indication her position has changed.

Christmas at the Cheney spread in Jackson Hole, Wyo., is a venerable, joyful tradition, and Poe long has been welcomed.

“She’s told me the Cheneys have always been accepting of her and never done anything to make her uncomfortable. Never,” Ciulla said. “She feels she is part of that family and has never felt otherwise.”

Mary Cheney and Poe met as ice-hockey competitors in the late 1980s or early ’90s. “I was a goalie and she was a defenceman. I think she scored on her first shot because I was really bad,” Cheney once told People magazine.

Mary attended Colorado College and Poe played for one of the teams in the league, according to Mary’s 2006 book, Now It’s My Turn. Nearly everything publicly known about their relationship comes from the book and from interviews Mary did to promote it.

A challenge to the couple’s relative anonymity emerged amid signs that Dick Cheney, who headed the 2000 vice presidential search committee, would end up as Bush’s running mate. “Personally, I’d rather not be known as the vice president’s lesbian daughter,” Mary says she told her father, but pledged to do “whatever I can to help out on the campaign.”

In the 2000 vice presidential debate, Dick Cheney staked out an inclusive position on gay relationships and signalled his acceptance of same-sex marriage. “I think we ought to do everything we can to tolerate and accommodate whatever kind of relationships people want to enter into,” he said.

“We live in a free society and freedom means freedom for everyone,” the candidate said.

But by 2004, Cheney’s view would be subordinated by the Republican Party’s push for a Federal Marriage Amendment to outlaw same-sex marriage. Mary was deeply troubled. She came “very close” to quitting her job as director of vice presidential operations on the campaign, she says in the book.Today Poe is a stay-at-home mom; Mary is a political consultant. Their first child, Sam, was born in 2007, and Sarah Lynne in 2009.

Mary and Liz Cheney evidently have not spoken in months. Lynne and Dick Cheney said they were “pained” to see the feud go public, but seemed to side with Liz in a statement.

Poe is said to be very fond of her father-in-law. She spoke to him, in a way, when she posted her comments on Facebook. Despite her zingers against Liz, her admiration for the family patriarch came through in the final line:

“I always thought freedom meant freedom for EVERYONE,” she wrote, right on message.

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